A.D. Allen Chemistry Library

Library Hours

Library hours are 9 am to 5 pm Monday to Friday (No weekend hours)
During July and August the hours are 9 am to 4:30 pm Monday to Friday.

Off campus access

Faculty, staff and grad students can now set up VPN access to the university network and have access to electronic resources as if they were on campus.
Go to vpn.utoronto.ca for the details.

Discoverygate access to Beilstein

Discoverygate is a web browser based access to Beilstein (the other access was via the MDL crossfire platform)

The advantage of Discoverygate is that it contains more databases than just Beilstein and Gmelin - it contains a host of medicinal chemistry and synthetic methodology databases as well. And best of all, it is accessible from home using the proxy server (using your barcode and PIN or your Utorid)

The Crossfire platform is still available although if you haven't used it for a while you will need to modify some settings as we have changed the host provider. Go here to get more info.

Good news: Discoverygate works fine on Macs (even Intel Macs) so now we have off-campus access for Mac as well!
Bad news: The Crossfire version of Beilstein/Gmelin does not seem to work on Intel Macs.

Keeping up with the Literature

Want to try to keep up with the literature in your area of study?
Overwhelmed by the number of journals and articles being published?

Below are links to three current awareness journals in organic syntheses (2 titles) and natural products chemistry. These, along with alerts from Scopus and/or Web of Science, can help you keep up with the huge amounts of articles being published weekly. Another piece of advice for alerts is try setting up an alert for articles that cite yours (works best if you have a unique name) - you can see how your work is being used by others sometimes in ways you never expected!

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The latest issue of Catalysts & Catalysed Reactions has now been added to the online database:
http://www.rsc.org/catalysts

Catalysts & Catalysed Reactions is a major current awareness publication, providing graphical abstracts of new developments in catalysis. Now in its fourth year of publication, the monthly issues are designed to keep you fully up-to-date with the latest, most important developments from the ever-increasing volume of current literature. The online version is fast becoming an invaluable and searchable database of catalysis research.

Catalysts & Catalysed Reactions provides:

• The best work selected from a variety of source journals
• Approximately 200 abstracts per issue
• Graphical symbols to aid browsing
• Easy online searching, using a variety of index terms
• Abstracts within only three months of the source

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The latest issue of Methods in Organic Synthesis has now been added to the online database at http://www.rsc.org/Publishing/CurrentAwareness/MOS/MOSLatestIssue.cfm

Methods in Organic Synthesis (MOS) is an alerting service covering the most important current developments in organic synthesis. It is designed with the synthetic organic chemist in mind and provides informative reaction schemes and covering new reactions and new methods.

MOS covers such topics as:

• functional group changes
• the introduction of chiral centres
• enzyme and biological transformations

Items are selected for inclusion in MOS only where there is detail of novel or interesting features in organic synthetic methods so that there are no routine preparations to plough through. Abstracts are added within only three months of publication of the source material.

Each MOS item includes reaction schemes, title and bibliographic details, and the items are categorised by four indexes: Product, Reaction, Reactant and Reagent.

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Also Natural Products Updates latest month abstracts can be viewed from here: http://www.rsc.org/Publishing/CurrentAwareness/npu/index.asp

Natural Product Updates (NPU) provides graphical abstracts of new developments in natural product chemistry, selected from over 80 primary journals.
Coverage includes:

• Isolation studies
• Biosynthesis
• New natural products
• Known compounds from new sources
• Structure determinations
• New properties and biological activities

Over 200 graphical abstracts are contained in each monthly bulletin, including structure diagrams, trivial and taxonomic names, molecular formulae, physical and biological properties.

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The Royal Society does have a number of other resources in print and online for other subjects as well, such as spectroscopy and analysis: http://www.rsc.org/Publishing/CurrentAwareness/

If you have any questions or need more info on any of the above items, please contact me, Patricia Meindl, at pmeindl@chem.utoronto.ca or stop by the Chemistry Library.